“The evidence is burning off,” says U.S. writer Zachary Nowak, direct from the Italian courtroom where former lovers Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are appealing their murder conviction. “It’s like that mist you see every morning, way down in the valley between Perugia and Assisi. It just disappears. This astonishes me. It’s so clear.”

Indeed, lack of proof is as obvious as the colossal crucifix that hangs over Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann in the age-old Hall of Frescoes. For reporters, that’s the big difference between this new slow-motion spectacle and the 11-month circus that ended in the conviction of the two college students for the slashing of British scholar Meredith Kercher. Meanwhile grave evidence, from a bloody handprint to DNA inside the victim, points to smalltime crook Rudy Guede as the lone killer. Convicted in a fast-track trial of his own choosing, he’s fresh out of appeals.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini still pursues Amanda and Raffaele like a linebacker on speed, but his “unassailable” case is on life support. In the first trial, superwitness/vagrant Antonio Curatolo was what Americans call “a useful idiot,” able to see whatever the prosecution required from his park bench. But now he’s the poster boy for everything that’s gone south. Red-faced, babbling about Christianity, he shuffled into court as a convicted heroin dealer. He was literally laughed out of the hearing when he couldn’t remember what night he saw the defendants standing around for hours on a gritty basketball court, supposedly casing the crime scene, on a bitterly cold night. A story that never has made a lick of sense.

Even worse, two independent experts from Rome’s Sapienza University took a hard look at the miniscule DNA that Mignini used to nail Amanda and Raffaele to the crime. Forget about it. Mignini had Amanda’s hand on the alleged murder weapon, but the experts couldn’t find enough DNA on that blood-free, unwashed kitchen knife to test. As for the tiny bra clasp said to pin Raffaele (and unidentified others) to the crime scene, it rusted in police custody.

Since the DNA can’t be retested, the methods used by forensic scientist Patrizia Stefanoni are under the microscope, and she doesn’t like that one bit. She didn’t cough up the requested data until two days before last weekend’s hearing. When the experts came to court, they complained about the prosecution’s lack of cooperation and asked Judge Hellmann for an extra 40 days. This pushes the verdict into the fall.

Long-time Perugia resident Zach Nowak has a front-row seat at the action. A novelist, and Umbra Institute professor who’s been contributing to ABC, he spoke to me by Skype after the hearing. Here he talks about everything from Curatolo’s wacky testimony to whether he thinks Amanda Knox was hit during the all-night interrogation that ended in a jail cell and a 26-year conviction.

You attended the first trial, now this one. What’s different?

There’s just a lot more interest in forensic evidence this time. That’s important. Something that’s unfortunately not different is the prosecution uses witnesses who are borderline ridiculous. You’ve got Curatolo, the vagabond, highly incoherent, He couldn’t even remember what night he saw Amanda and Raffaele near the crime scene. He’s talking about people all dressed up for Halloween and he has no idea what Halloween is. Judge asks him, When is Halloween? He says oh, the first or second of November. Judge asks him about his drug use. He admits he’s a user of heroin at the time, but hastens to add that it doesn’t cause hallucinations. Yeah, right.

This appeal is so different. We couldn’t see the forest for the trees in the first case. There were so many witnesses. One day there were eight. You couldn’t process them all. Now it’s simple. The judge asks Curatolo, What day is Halloween? Oh, the first or the second. Well, buona notte, this guy doesn’t even know what Halloween is. Do you take drugs? Yeah. Okay, you can leave the stand.

Mignini says believe everything but that one part of Curatolo’s testimony, the part about Halloween. Well, this is called cherry picking. You can’t do that.

Is the defense changing any hearts and minds in Perugia?

I hear a lot from the police involved in the case, who are sort of like spectators in the courtroom. Not the local police but the penitentiary police, the carabiniere–they seem to be much more supportive of the idea that Amanda and Raffaele had nothing to do with it. They’ll actually say, to friends and family members: You know, we don’t really think it happened the way the prosecution said.

Homicide police chief Monica Napoleoni tried to rehab Curatolo on the stand. She didn’t show at the last hearing. How’d she get away with that?

Well, she said she had a professional obligation, sort of like you don’t want to go to a wedding, you say you’ve got work and nobody’s gonna check up. As for how she acted on the stand, well, exactly the same as the first trial. Haughty, responding tersely to defense lawyers, interrupting them. A very hostile witness, that’s for sure.

She was supposed to show Curatolo could’ve seen disco buses on the night of the murder, as he said, that he wasn’t confused about his nights. How’d that go?

Almost laughable. It shows the prosecution’s profound ignorance about how university life works. It’s ridiculous. You can ask any college student, if the first Thursday fell on a holiday, would you go out? No, because everything’s closed, everybody’s going home to see their families. So why would any disco buses stop in Piazza Grimana? Who would they pick up?

What about Amanda? We hear a lot about her new, sad demeanor.

I don’t find her that different. I notice that she’s very nicely dressed, but for me those details are irrelevant. What can you tell from looking at her? The demeanor stuff, that’s what the local press comes up with. Nothing to write about, just bullshit, that’s all they’ve got.

What did the press miss in the last hearing?

The experts made it clear, very politely, that Dr. Stefanoni and the rest of the CSI folks in Rome had not been super cooperative.The experts had a problem getting information from Stefanoni. They had to ask repeatedly. At one point Stefanoni said to them, you don’t need that. And the judge came back to her and said, yeah, I do.

A Rolling Stone reporter was at the hearing. The magazine is doing a story on the Amanda Knox case. What’d he have to say?

He talked to me about the banality of incompetence. Not that the local police are idiots or stupid, but that they don’t have the training to investigate a murder. These people are rusty because they don’t do murder cases a lot. I’m sure they’re expert investigators in tracking down lost dogs and things like that. I don’t know if these people went to college or to the police academy. Now they’re expected to solve a complicated murder case. This is not a complex murder, in my opinion, it’s simple, but if you make it complicated, then you have to investigate it right. Most of the investigation was ex post facto, after people were arrested. Before that, the police basically did depositions. You can’t really call that investigating.

Amanda is also being tried for slander, as are her parents, for claiming she was hit during her interrogation. Does she have a chance?

Hope? None. You have eight police officers against somebody who’s been found guilty of murder. It’s her word against theirs.

Where’s the interrogation tape that would answer all questions?

I don’t think there was ever a video. Audio, maybe. But you’ll never see it. Why would they want to show that? You’d hear them hitting Amanda on tape. People screaming at her and her saying she didn’t do it, until finally she signed. If that audio was out there, it’s broken now.

Questura, Perugia, Italy: Amanda was questioned here all night in November 2007. She's been locked up abroad ever since. Photo by Candace Dempsey

My guess is if you had a video of that night, you’d probably see 30 people in the room, half of them screaming at Amanda, trying to get her to say something she didn’t want to say. Thirty people shouting at her in a language she didn’t understand. And probably somebody smacked her, the way police do all over the world. They’re not gonna beat her. A little cuff on the back of head to get her to talk, to take out their frustration. That’s my guess.

What about the five prisoners coming to the next hearing, claiming Rudy Guede told him that he killed Meredith Kercher all by himself?

You have a bunch of guys in prison who come into court and claim they know who did it? Are you going to believe it? The prosecution will say right away that these people aren’t credible, they’re from jail. The problem is the prosecution also has sketchy witnesses. You’re talking about jail time, unreliability. Curatolo, Kokomani. There’s an old Italian saying, You can’t have your wife drunk and your barrel of wine full.

Mignini recently changed the crime theory in a British interview. Now Amanda’s not the stabber. She’s outside the murder room, instigating the murder. Are we going to see yet another new crime theory in closing arguments?

With Mignini, it’s like choose your own adventure. You know, those books where, after a couple of pages; they ask if you want to go through a different door. The starting point is different but the outcome is always the same, the victim is always dead in a pool of blood.

Has this case changed Perugia forever?

No, I don’t see a radical difference. You have days where rest of the world is focused on that one courtroom and people in Perugia aren’t even aware that a hearing is going on. There are tons of students who don’t eve know the murder occurred here. In the United States, in 20 years, nobody will remember what happened.

MURDER IN ITALY, my book on the spell-binding Amanda Knox case, is a Library Journal Bestseller. Winner of Best True Crime 2010 Editor’s Choice and Reader’s Choice awards. Called “a real-life murder mystery as terrifying and compelling as fiction,” it’s built on diary excerpts, wiretaps, court scenes, trial transcripts, first-hand experience and interviews with key players for all sides.

MURDER IN ITALY is online at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound and bookstores. It’s also a Kindle & ebook. I’ll blog about the Knox case until the final appeal.